Hello? I'm Calling From Twitter

You can't have 'meaningful interaction' in 140 characters

(NEWSER) - Call him a rebel, but Farhad Manjoo wants Twitter to double the number of characters allowed in a tweet. To many users, that’s sacrilege. But on Twitter’s fifth anniversary, “the 140-character limit feels less like a feature than a big, obvious bug,” Manjoo writes on Slate . “Forcing people to shrink their updates to 140 characters prevents meaningful interaction between users, short-circuits conversations, and turns otherwise straightforward thoughts into a bewildering jumble of txtese.” More»

Total posts up from 1B a year ago, 5B just 4 months ago

(NEWSER) - Twitter isn’t growing as explosively as it used to, but the volume of traffic on the microblogging site is still expanding fast enough that it should hit 10 billion total tweets in the coming days. That’s up from a billion about a year ago, and 5 billion just 4 months ago. Gauging the progress is quite simple, Mashable reports; just look at the number tag at the end of a tweet’s URL. A recent one read 9917803012, and the site produces about 50 million a day. More»

Microblogger makes users' ownership of tweets explicit

(NEWSER) - Twitter’s new terms of service allow advertising, although the company has not proposed or implemented any yet, the East Bay Business Times reports. "We leave the door open for advertising. We'd like to keep our options open, as we've said before," wrote creative director Biz Stone. The new TOS also make it explicit that users own their rweets. More»

(NEWSER) - Still learning the ropes of microblogging, Oprah Winfrey posted her first tweet this morning, the Chicago Tribune reports. In her first tweet—“HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY”—she committed the Twitter faux pas of writing in all caps and using the wrong term for Twitter adherents, or "Tweeple.” Nonetheless, her feed already has 103,000 followers—and the number is climbing by the second. More»

Twitter leads to two men missing in Alps whiteout, one dead

(NEWSER) - The first-ever "Twitter rescue" saved the life of a snowboarder in the Swiss Alps, but failed a 29-year-old British music entrepreneur whose body was found at the foot of a 66-foot cliff, reports the Daily Telegraph. Cheery "tweets" from a female companion noting "am having the best time here at Verbier" changed to panicked bulletins when Rob Williams and his pal, founders of Dolphin Music, went missing in a blizzard whiteout. More»